Yeah, I´ve seen that Post from Netheara. The problem is: The gear-swapping isn´t that big of an issue for me. I mean it was nice to swap in Fire-Resi for Leotheras, or Tanking-Gear for the Bow at KaelThas, but it´s not something totally crucial. On the other hand the lack of being able to drink, removes on the one hand the best ability if something goes badly concerning mana (e.g. a couple of drains at Karathress) and makes AotH near to senseless, since I´ve been using FD+drink in many SSC/TK-Fights. Nearly every fight there provides a dmg-stop, either wenn the boss makes some emote, or wipes his aggro or provides some other idle-time which could be filled up with drinking, enabling the use of AotH nearly throughout the fight.

Now, a BM-Hunter will become even more viable in terms of raid-DPS compared to a MM, considering that BM still does a lot of DPS just with the use of Steady-Shot and KillCommand, which you can normally spam even if you´re oom, due to the regg vom AotV. Not that this does bother me that much, since I´m BM and it´s kind of okay in my opinion, since MM is the best arena specc (even superior now with 2.3 with the nice little twist with Pets an targets that stand in front of walls).

But generally AotH will be a no-go, unless grouped with a SP (lol, dare asking^^). Or has anybody some other conclusions?

The recent changes made to AotV define it, in my opinion, more as an aspect you switch to when reaching low-mana.
The rest of the time, you are simply better off using AotH.

The way I see it, we may have individual mana troubles, but raiding is all about the different interactions between classes.
Whether it is a Shadow Priest in your group, a Restau. Chaman, or your Paladins being organized enough to maintain a JoW on the boss, there are ways, in addition to mana pot-ing when necessary, to overcome these mana troubles.

For what I know, my guild's mages are simply not able to raid efficiently without a Shadow Priest.
We hunters are.

Okay, a constant JoW is a huge boost, but even with it on, you have to switch to AotV sooner or later (in recent times more often sooner). Then there are fights, where you have too much Adds or simply the Pallys are occupied (I speak about raiding w/o a Retri) elsewhere and simply don´t have the time. And popping a pot on every CD is what I generally assume.

I´d say the most annoying thing about no longer being able to drink is simply, that it´s getting more pot-intensive. It was just comfortable on Farmstatus-bosses to just sit an drink, rather than pop pots which cost money. That´ll work no more, and as I said, you are no longer able to miss the right point of aspect-switching otherwise you´ll face serious mana-issues.

The biggest issue with the loss of getting out of combat is the ability to feed pet.

In MH and BT however pro you are, your pet will die at some point, and to lose dps from the inability to fd feed pet is beyond belief.

It's not even the loss of dps going from Happy to Neutral. It's that you can't use your pet at all. You get ONE pet rez. That's it.

If your pet dies, you can bring him back at Neutral. If he dies a 2nd time, your done. Rezzing him a 2nd time brings him back at Unhappy, and then you have to worry about him running off and losing your pet. (Not to mention that if he does die a 3rd time, you are pretty much guaranteeing that he will run off before you can feed him when you rez him back again.)

They either need to:
A.) Make 'Feed Pet' usable in combat.
B.) Make Imp. Revive Pet talent bring pets back at the same happiness level they died at.
C.) Just remove the happiness loss that pet's get when they die.

I've had my pet die 5 times on both Illidari Council and Archimonde without running off, without feeding.

I'm betting it would take far longer than one boss encounter to reach loyalty level 5. Think about how long it takes to get loyalty levels. I'll see if I can do some research into deaths per loyalty level this weekend. Maybe keep rezzing him and sending him at a Fel Reaver.

I had to change my positioning in each fight to get my pet to attack, although I could never get my pet to attack Alar since there was no ground behind him, my pet just ran around in circles by the base of the ramp. I have no idea how it got missed in the PTR either - seems like a pretty big thing. A fellow hunter asked a GM about it and he stated, "there is not a bug currently." Yeah, right buddy - read the forums that are blowing up. As I attempt additional bosses, I will post what I have found.

Don't forget the new arrows from the Violet Eye at 80 silver a pop.

Your pet will need to lose all 6 loyalty levels, which take 2+ hours each on unhappy to lose. You wont lose it fast, and no chance ever in the space of a single boss encounter. Its nice that you care for your pet and its deaths so radically however.

Elitist Jerks always comes through in the clutch. After reading the hunter forums, my head wanted to explode, but EJ's rational thinking saved the day once again. Sure, not being able to FD + Drink is going to be annoying is certain cases (between phases of some encounters), but the real problem is definitely pet happiness. Not being able to feed your pet while in combat has really been quite silly from the beginning. If you were a game developer and you didn't want to make rezzing a pet free of any resource cost, you would probably assign some sort of a long cast time to the spell (say 10 seconds), make it cost a lot of mana, and make the pet return with partial life and no buffs. Oh wait...all of those already exist and make rezzing a pet annoying enough (even with talents). It seems excessive to add happiness loss on top of all that.

The other irony is how Blue called it a bug. Like somehow in the vast amount of patches they have released, not to mention the expansion, they suddenly stumbled upon this and decided that three years later seemed like a good time to fix the "bug". My theory, a couple of weeks ago someone at Blizzard finally got around to playing a hunter, and this sentence was yelled down halls of the Irvine headquarters "Holy crap! You can feign death and drink" (in my head this is done by their now lead hunter who is too busy aimed shotting and serpent stinging everything to adjust actually important aspects of the class like weapon speed....probably a guy named Legolas).

Well, regarding feeding of pets in combat, this from the WoW Forums:

<Nethaera> [...] I just wanted to stop back in the thread here to relay that the ability to feed a pet during combat is in the works for a future patch. [...]

WoW Forums -> WTB FD Drink

Aran targets anyone low on health and bombards them with 3 or 4 arcane blasts. This includes pets. I've seen him do the exact same thing to my cat.


As long as I'm posting, I'll ask a question. I'm a BM hunter and I use the standard steady /auto macro. I've seen some people say it doesn't work right anymore and others say it does work. So far it appears to be working for me, but I do seem to be going through more mana than I recall being the case before the patch. Does the macro need to be tweaked?

At loyality 6 I never encountered any loyality loss. Even after a whole night of wiping on Archimonde without feeding it once. (used my pet only for fear breaking)

I must agree, the loyalty loss is something quite rarely caused by a few pet deaths. It probably occured to me only once, in a night of wiping at HKM back in the spring, and i'm pretty sure that wiping for 4 ours without feeding the pet wasn't what caused it to roll back one loyalty level. However, the more pressing issue of the FD change is not having your pet leave you; rather, the downgrade from 125% damage to 75% damage your pet does(a 40% loss of the total pet damage) is going to hurt you more over the course of a fight than not being able to drink.

One of the best things I ever did on Void Reaver was have a mage cast Dampen Magic on my pet. It doesn't affect Mend Pet, but does affect Pounding.

One would just weave this macro in between auto-shots then? Hmm, sounds nice. I've been having lots of issues with my macro being broken after 2.3. I'll have to try this out.

Now that I'm here, I'll ask the question. Is everyone here still using their original KC/SS->AS macro? My macro had the "reset=target/3" statement, and I kept getting the message "invalid option". I'm curious to know what everyone else has done.

I am still using my macro, but it doesn't have the target/3 value for reset. Rather, mine's just set to a static 3. If you could post your macro here (I'd post mine, but I'm busy being unproductive at work) we may have a better idea of what could be causing the issue.

Following in your tradition, I'd like to ask a question too. For some time I've been toying with haste items, and it seems that when I plug values into Cheeky's spreadsheet (OO version, but that may be for the spreadsheet thread) my DPS just keeps going up, even when I pass the 2.0 attack speed mark. Right now I'm sitting at 2.04 attack speed (without IAotH and Rapid Fire). I haven't found any concrete evidence on these boards (maybe I'm just not searching for the right things?) about the effective haste cap for hunters. Is there such a thing as too much haste for a BM hunter? What's the desired attack speed, and why? I seem (yes, anecdotal evidence, but Quartz reflects it as well) to still successfully maintain a tight 1:1 rotation with sub-2.0 attack speeds (albeit it's much harder and I recently have noticed occasional clipping of autoshots when rapid fire + IAotH are up). If anyone could direct me to some resources or help shed some light on the situation it would be much appreciated. The haste mechanics thread is sorely lacking in hunter input, I've found.

Very good question. From the haste mechanics thread I got this:

"Attack speed after all hastes should not go below 1 + .5 + latency seconds. The 1 is to give me a second in which to fit a special attack. The .5 is the auto-shot clipping buffer, and the latency is to account for travel time to the server. Your mileage may vary, but this has worked for me."

This is by no means any evidence for anything, but it sounds sound. For me personally, that'd cap the attack speed at 1.75 or thereabouts. This also sounds realistic from my experience; with no special buffs or anything I don't clip (with a 1.96 as). At Teron Gorefiend where you basically don't have an unhasted second between Quick Shots, Rapid Fire, Heroism and [Drums of Battle], clipping seems unavoidable, and maybe you'd be better off using a slower weapon.

The cap is really just 1.5 seconds + your latency, with the 1.5 seconds being the global cooldown. I usually run at 1.85 static speed and 1.6 when IotH procs, and I don't typically experience clipping issues. The thing with Rapid Fire and all the other haste effects are that they tighten up a rotation. For example, if you were to blow your cooldowns like Beastial Wrath + Trinkets + Any Racials (Blood Fury), having a haste modifier like Rapid Fire will tighten up your rotation during this time when you have the most damage potential. So, yes as your speed approaches the "optimal" range you will get less out of Rapid Fire, but it is still beneficial in most cases. Also, Heroism/Bloodlust is a unique speed modifier in that it speeds up the global cooldown, so you can run the same rotation...just faster.

Any other BM hunters have pet issues with parries with the new pet behavior?

There were 2 BM hunters, but they have to respec because the pets were attacking the middle of the bosses's model making the boss parry and bursting the tank. Each pet had about 10% parry on Mother and on Council, they didn't try on Illidan.


For RoS (where Locks usually use Felhunters) my puppy (for the two minute period of that phase) had a 6% parry rate

I believe this is an undocumented change, please correct me if I'm wrong. As of 2.3, Kill Command no longer requires or triggers the GCD. On TBC release, it both required and triggered, then it was buffed to require not trigger. Now, at long last, it can be used even when you are on GCD.